Butterflies
by Dread Pirate
Summary: Captured once again, Lore's capacity for pride and self-delusion knows no bounds.


**[Author's note: Because I mentioned him in the last chapter of "Hitchcock" I wrote, someone asked me if I'd ever written just for Lore. I hadn't. But I immediately wanted to.]**

He has no doubt that the restraints holding him immobile in the low-level light have been calibrated precisely to his own personal specifications. He knows this because his own personal specifications also happen to be someone else's.

How truly inconvenient it is to have every inch, every vital statistic, every strength and weakness of one's body known to one's captors before one is even captured. His fingers flex, methodically testing the limits of the metal cuff, although he already suspects it is useless.

Lore stares into the dimness and wonders why they have bothered to make it dark in the holding cell. It's a very small query to ponder, particularly for a positronic brain, and he runs it effortlessly alongside greater queries such as three different plans for escape, a full check on all his minor operational subroutines to identify any damage caused during the fight, and a hefty section of his primary neural net engages in an exploration of his anger and desire for vengeance upon his brother.

"_Lore, come here and look at this."_

"_What is it, Father?"_

It's probably dark, Lore decides (as he rules out a frontal assault on the guards and really starts to enjoy a fantasy about re-routing all Data's primary functions into a feedback loop and then encrypting the whole operation with a seventy-digit pass code which includes musical notation just for the hell of it) because ship-time decrees that it is night. His internal chronometer is still on local time, not Federation standard, and is useless. Ship time, space time - humans are so much like machines in many ways. Ruled by a solar clock that most of them have never even experienced. Who cared if it was night on Earth, orbiting Sol, when in space night was endless? So much like machines, caught up in a logic loop. A shame they weren't as efficient. A shame they all gave such weight to things like compassion.

"_Lore, come here and look at this."_

"_What is it, Father?"_

"_Come on, come on. Look. Quickly, now."_

_Soong's tone beckoned him, impatient. They were in the corner of the shared colony garden that the colonists rarely visited, where the trees were just at the beginning of their flowering season. "Look." The android, pale and inquisitive in plain brown coveralls, came obediently to his creator's side and stared at Soong's hand._

"_Don't look _at_ my hand, look at where I'm pointing. Follow the line of my finger and see what I'm indicating. That's it. You're learning. Now what do you think that is?"_

_Lore consulted his extensive memory banks, programmed with such care mere months before. _

"_It's a chrysalis," he said. _

"_Wrong, my boy. It's a butterfly. Or it soon will be." Caught in the surprised golden gaze, Soong grinned. "I'm just joking with you. Yes, it's a chrysalis. And what do you think is going to happen now?"_

On the other hand, perhaps it was dark so that the guards would be less easily distracted by anything Lore might have to do or say.

Lore does not test the strength of the shackles at his wrists and ankles again, because he knows they will hold him. Because of Data. Everything is always because of Data. Perfect, insufferable Data. Identical, in strength, speed, height, processing power. Every detail, down to leg length, hair tone, fingernail shape, vocal modulations…

They had known exactly how to trap him, where to hit him. They had been prepared. The only thing they hadn't been prepared for had been his utter, all-enveloping rage.

"_And what do you think is going to happen now?"_

"_A chrysalis," said Lore, eyes fixed upon the twisted brown thing that hung like a dead leaf, "is the stage where an insect, usually a caterpillar, changes from larva to adult. It is encased in a cocoon. The word also refers to the cocoon itself."_

"_You're being too literal. Tell me what's going to happen."_

_Lore blinked, caught between fact (confidence) and speculation (uncertainty). He realised that he did not want to be wrong. _

"_The butterfly will emerge?"_

"_The butterfly will emerge."_

They would be prepared for it next time, not that Lore plans to give them a next time. There is really nothing like grievous bodily harm upon organic life forms for cementing a lesson into their brains.

He indulges his anger in the same way he generally indulges his mercurial emotional state - liberally. It is, after all, the thing that makes him indisputably superior to his brother.

There are two guards outside the cell, and a single force field in place. Lore knows the guards are really just for show, because they are clearly both human and armed with single sidearms only. He also knows the phasers will be set on light stun, a setting which will only serve to stagger him. So it must be the force field and the restraints they are relying upon, and they have put a great deal of trust in them indeed.

Perhaps this is a contingency plan put in place by Starfleet for their precious Data, should he suddenly turn savage, and bite the hand that has gentled him, petted him and made much of him since his discovery on Omicron Theta. The restraints are far too skilfully put together to have been jury-rigged in the time between his detection and his capture.

"_The butterfly will emerge."_

_Lore noted that Soong was still pointing at the tiny brown chrysalis, and he dutifully watched as it twitched and began to split. _

_It took a long time, but Lore watched with fascination, as it was something he'd never seen before. The insect began to unfold from the tiny chamber, all damp angles and straining desire for life._

_And then it became stuck._

A simple, single-frequency brig force field - standard Federation, not even a hybrid using Romulan technology. Lore surmises that it has been set for above-human prisoner strength; probably a strength used for Vulcan or Klingon prisoners. It, too, is not as much of a problem as the restraints. It will inconvenience him, slow him down, but not stop him. The guards are not watching him, and he knows that their trust in their technology is absolute. They turn their back on his cell freely, spend time exchanging gossip at shift change, drink coffee while running over the latest magazine report come in via sub-space.

He curls his index finger backward at an angle impossible for a human body, and hears the gentle click as his finger joints and knuckles disengage.

"_It's stuck," Soong said, with alarm. He reached forward, tipped the tiny, straining creature with his fingertip. Lore watched dispassionately. "Thing'll never live if we don't give it a helping hand. Lore, get me a scalpel."_

_The scalpels were kept in the top drawer of the little biological sciences lab. Lore fetched one swiftly, not immune to the unfriendly and frankly frightened glances of the colonists as he returned to the garden – Soong's android carrying a bladed weapon was clearly not high on their list of encouraging sights. _

_Soong took the scalpel and very gently steadied the struggling insect with his right hand. "Easy, now," he murmured. Lore wondered why he was talking to something that couldn't possibly understand him. "Just stay still. I'm going to make this easier for you. You'll soon be mixing in with all the other butterflies."_

_He cut the bulging chrysalis along the back, very carefully and slowly so as not to hurt the creature struggling so hard to break free. The butterfly emerged all at once in a rush. It was fatter than Lore had expected from his encyclopaedic memory banks, and looked sticky, crumpled, as if some unkind hand had picked it up, crumpled it in a fist, and cast it aside._

"_Don't worry," said Soong, and Lore blinked. He had not been worried at all. "They all look a bit rough when they first come out. But give it a few minutes in the sun and it'll soon be dry and flying away."_

_Lore watched intently as the butterfly crept forward on wobbling legs across his father's hand._

The tip of Lore's index fingernail creeps under the cold metal edge of the restraint cuff and braces there, ready. He allows himself a moment's satisfaction – Data would never have thought of this. Poor Data, pathetic Data, who was given so much less of humanity by Soong than had been granted to Lore, and had to do it all the hard way. Data, the idiot who struggled so hard to be human when it was all so easy if you were just given -

- well, when you were just _not _Data. Lore's father had helped him so much, the mad old coot. Made it so much easier for him to live with humans, to understand their brief, passionate little lives. To manipulate them.

Lore's fingernail cracks upward a millimetre or so, tiny indicator lights blinking within. He runs the nail lightly along the edge of the metal cuff, listening to the resulting harmonics with his phenomenally acute hearing. The seal sounds like it is based on hyper-magnetism, controlled remotely by a carrier wave. Very reliable, in most situations. Very predictable. Always behaved in a standard way, followed a standard pattern.

_The butterfly was not behaving in the way Lore had expected it to. Soong gave it a prod, but the wings did not unfold and the body dragged bulbously across his palm. _

"_Something's not right," he muttered, after it became obvious that the creature wasn't going to be flying. Lore said nothing, still dutifully watching. The butterfly tipped over onto its side, useless wings still crumpled and stuck together, and waved its legs helplessly. As if in deliberate contrast, another butterfly, whole and colourful and perfect, landed on Lore's pallid, gold-tinged hand and beat its wings once against his synthetic skin before rising aloft. Soong turned his gaze to follow the insect as it vanished into the sky, then met the yellow eyes of his creation with a terrible, empty expression. _

_He tapped the back of his son's hand to make the android turn it palm-up, then tipped the crippled butterfly into Lore's palm._

"_Here," he said, wearily. "It won't be able to live like the others, not now. Put it out of its misery."_

_In the act of walking away, he turned his head just enough to add, "By that I mean kill it," and then he was gone. _

_Lore, still staring after his father, automatically made a fist, then looked down at the resulting dusty mess in his hand with curiosity. _

_It wasn't until years later, when absorbing an entire university's research records on etymology, that Lore was to encounter a lesser known theory on butterfly development. With butterflies, it is the physiological struggle to escape the chrysalis that forces the wings to fill, the body to empty and lighten, and the insect to fly. The struggle alone makes the butterfly fit for the world it will inhabit._

_Oddly enough, he gave it little thought._

Lore, hanging in his restraints like an insect pinned to a card, listens carefully to the harmonics as the two guards come to attention outside his cell. Someone important is coming, the captain in all likelihood, someone who will want to waste time talking to him and asking him all those oh-so-vital questions ("What have you done with my officers?") with fear and weakness written in their dull, animal eyes. That someone will eventually order him removed from the cell, to be examined by engineers. Humans really could be like machines, real sticklers for protocol -

The doors whisper open, and light streams in.

"Hello, Lore."

Lore turns his gaze toward the ceiling in disgust, as if following the flight of that long-ago butterfly.

"Hello, brother."


End file.
